About Homer Dodge Martin

Homer Dodge Martin began as a Hudson River School painter of detailed panoramic scenes of the Adirondacks, but later adopted a more gestural Tonalist style, producing intimate landscapes of melancholic wilderness. Martin was a loner and introvert, a reader of John Keats and Henry David Thoreau: his late landscapes were poetic expressions of subjective experience. Some of his finest work was painted in Normandy, France, whose coastline and misty weather were the inspiration for his expressive paint handling that verged on Impressionist technique, but with a more somber palette. Towards the end of his life, dying of cancer and with his eyesight failing, his paintings became even more visionary. As a contemporary critic wrote: “Martin did not absorb nature and then pass it through the prism of his own consciousness … but himself passed into nature and became once more conceived in her…”